The Quest shall return next week. I was taken up with a thought and wrote on that this week.
I was thinking about something recently, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. In talking to my historically minded friends, I mentioned that one of my favorite historical themes is the last gasp of empire.
Picture this: There is an old lion dying on the savannah. His mane is grey, his teeth decayed, his claws chipped and broken. But as the vultures circle and the hunters move in, he raises his head and gives one last roar. A reminder that once all on the plains feared that sound and his coming.
What does this have to do with historical empire?
Well, fortunately his story is full of examples of great empires falling apart, only to give one last gasp. Think of Rome, both halves of the empire as they slowly winked out, one thousand years apart.
The Western Empire was falling apart. It could no longer control its borders and the barbarians were setting up kingdoms inside it like tumors. Soon it would fall apart. Worse still, outside its borders lay the Scourge of God, Attila the Hun.
Broken, hurting, falling apart at the seams, Rome raised its head once more and marched an army to the Catalaunian Plains to face the Huns.
In my mind, I see them saying: “Okay. You wanted Rome. You’ll get Rome…and you’ll regret it. We are the men who defeated the Etruscans, who destroyed the Celts. We are going to show you why Hannibal Barca died in exile. We are going to show you why in ages past a man might walk from Abila Mons to the Rock of Gibraltar and never hear another language but Latin. The list of kings and generals we beat and humiliated is so long that your name will be scrawled in the margins, beneath greater men. You call yourself the Scourge of God, well we crucified Him.”
Rome beat Attila. The great Hun’s last battle was a defeat against the Romans. A dying empire marched into battle against an enemy that only ever beat them. They marched into battle all the same, and finding that ancient strength in them, the triumphed.
Then there’s the Byzantine Empire, the part of Rome that fell a thousand years after the western half. The Byzantines were betrayed by the Fourth Crusade. Constantinople was taken and the Catholic, Latin Empire was born.
It took them Byzantines time reorganize, about seventy years, but when they did they came marching back. It was their turn to stand outside the Theodosian walls. Those great walls that had stood for a thousand years, beneath which withered the goths. The Huns turned right around. The armies of the Prophet resorted to cannibalism before taking the walls. The Bulgars, the Catholics, then them.
They took their walls back in one night and drove the Venetians into the sea, returning the great churches to Orthodoxy.
The Mughals had a few great victories right before the end. Same with the Tang. I’m sure China, with its many dynasties, had quite a few of these. The Falkland War fits in here too. The Brits, a rump of their empire, look at the Junta and said “I will show you why they feared us.”
I don’t know. Just something I think about from time to time. The only themes of history are the ones who put on it. The thing is too vast to and nuanced to do the same thing twice. What are your favorite themes of history?
Michael Frutig 